Film Studies
L’abito di domani: Storia della moda nel tempo, Giovanna Gagliardo (dir.) (2009), Italy: Luce Cinecittà
Review of: L’abito di domani: Storia della moda nel tempo Giovanna Gagliardo (dir.) (2009) Italy: Luce Cinecittà
‘Vetrine della Moda’: Forms and models of femininity on the pages of fascist movie magazines
Italian fascism of the 1930s dominated more than just politics particularly as it spilled over into styles of clothing. This article demonstrates that despite the manipulative ideology of fascism women found other ways to affirm their femininity. American fashion and costumes conveyed through the movie magazines of the same period became evidence of new cultural models that stood out in opposition to the Duce and his familiar and domestic ideals. Magazines such as Stelle and Cinema Illustrazione which were considered ‘cultural intermediaries’ proposed an image of a new woman built through exotic and sensual clothing and looks. Many columns were dedicated to building a direct relationship between the audience and the entertainment industry. As the industry sprung up with more advertisements and fashion articles it promoted new clothing styles make-up use and acting. This cultural orientation represented a historical contradiction which this article will consider.
Malavita chic: Fashion and fandom in the Italian crime series
This article analyses how fashion in the Italian crime series Suburra and Gomorrah is a significant facet of how these programmes’ visual and narrative discourses work upon audiences to communicate a privileged vision of the criminal subcultures they represent. Clothing and style are crucial to the series through the narrative dimension in which costuming reveals character development and symbolizes shifts in plot and theme as well by articulating the characters’ adherence to and deviation from their cultural milieu. Moreover by presenting an ethnography of criminal subcultures as articulated through dress these series have engendered a complex network of fashion fandom raising significant questions about viewer identification and the reification of mob wear within mainstream culture. This in-depth analysis of the role of fashion in Suburra and Gomorrah aims to deepen our understanding of how these series constitute a significant intervention on the interplay of fashion and identity in Italy today.
The costumes of an archaic dream: Pasolini, Danilo Donati and Oedipus the King (1967)
This article examines the collaboration between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Danilo Donati. Pasolini wanted the aesthetic of Oedipus the King to evoke an ‘indistinct barbaric’ feel and asked the great costume designer Danilo Donati for a mélange of Persian Sumerian Aztec and African art. Pasolini sought the shapes the drawings and the sculptures of an archaic civilization but mixed together adhering to the Pasolinian method of contamination so that they would lose their original identity in a new form that at the same time recalled ancient cultures or in the case of the African art even tribal history.
Fashioning: Women and gender in film and fashion
This article introduces the interviews featured in this issue of the journal with filmmaker Alina Marazzi and creative director of the Maison Christian Dior Maria Grazia Chiuri. In 2020 Maria Grazia Chiuri commissioned Alina Marazzi to make a short film about the work of Lucia Marcucci a feminist visual poet and artist active in the 1960s and 1970s who combined the language of mass media and advertising and addressed themes such as the changing values of family domesticity and the role of women. Focusing on the work of Alina Marazzi and Maria Grazia Chiuri this article provides a framework to explore the long history of fashion and film as well as the collaboration between Chiuri and female artists. In addition to discussing the digital genre of the ‘fashion film’ the essay contextualizes the emergence and development of the field of fashion studies and its relationship with feminism women the media and the history of women and fashion.
Eclectic primitivism: Piero Tosi’s Medea (1969)
Marked by difficult beginnings Piero Tosi’s work on the costumes for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 Medea turned out to be one of the designer’s most innovative contributions. Departing from his own philological method and from the protective alliance with Luchino Visconti Tosi eventually came to absorb from Pasolini a liberating form of contamination which remains at the core of the film’s primitivistic costumes. Seconding Pasolini’s allegorical intentions and anthropological imagination Tosi reconstructed the mythological past of the Euripidean tragedy without incurring the clichés of conventional Hellenism. Supported by dressmaker Umberto Tirelli he created experimental works that drew upon a variety of anachronistic sources from seventeenth-century Tupi feather garments to early twentieth-century fashion from Pre-Columbian gold ornaments to Italian mannerist paintings. This article aims at uncovering several overlooked references in Tosi’s postmodern eclecticism while providing a documented reconstruction of the designer’s collaboration with Pasolini.
Interview with Alina Marazzi: The tactile gaze
Alina Marazzi is a well-known Italian feminist director whose explorations of women’s lives the challenges they have faced (and still face) in society and the family have had a profound impact on film and feminist studies. She has contributed to creating a new cinematic language and mode of storytelling through experimenting with the use of both collage and montage. She has also made incursions into the world of fashion with a film on international fashion icon and intellectual Anna Piaggi and later with her short film that the House of Dior commissioned: To Cut Is to Think (2020). The interview focuses on this latter film where Marazzi shares her experience in working on the film the opportunities it opened up for her creative process her collaboration with Maria Grazia Chiuri and her encounter with the work of the poet and artist Lucia Marcucci whose work is the subject of the film.
The New Made in Italy for the 21st Century: Fashion, Film, Art and Design, Eugenia Paulicelli, Claudio Napoli and Massimo Mascolo (dirs) (2022), USA: Okozoko
Review of: The New Made in Italy for the 21st Century: Fashion Film Art and Design Eugenia Paulicelli Claudio Napoli and Massimo Mascolo (dirs) (2022) USA: Okozoko
‘Film, Fashion, Costume in Italy and Beyond’
This editorial positions the study of fashion and costume against the field of film studies and the history of Italian cinema and media. Although scholarly approaches to this field of study first appeared in Anglo American literature at the beginning of the 1990s the pioneering work of Italian historian and film critic Mario Verdone has yet to be acknowledged. The anthology Verdone edited in 1950 a pivotal year of Italy’s post-war reconstruction was the first of its kind: prior to its publication the relationship between costume fashion and film had never been the subject of scholarly enquiry. The title of Verdone’s book La moda e il costume nel film (‘Fashion and costume in film’) calls attention to how these arts techniques and industries work in the actual process of making films. Verdone’s book offers a context for the articles contained in this volume.
Interview with Maria Grazia Chiuri: Women in fashion: Crafting feminisms
Maria Grazia Chiuri creative director at the House of Christian Dior talks about her current role working for the French luxury brand. She reflects on how passionate she is about highlighting and promoting women’s multifaceted manifestations of work image and creativity. Chiuri also discusses her long career in fashion starting with her mother’s atelier her studies at the European Institute of Design and then her work for the Fendi sisters and Valentino both located in Rome where she was born. Chiuri stresses certain books have been crucial for her from Ngozi’s recent bestseller We Should All Be Feminists (2015) to Clare Hunter’s Threads of Life (2019) and classical texts by Simone de Beauvoir as well as Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970). In addition she emphasizes how beneficial it has been to be able to immerse herself in Dior’s rich archive. She finds inspiration in the history of women fashion feminism the arts cinema and how all these institutions promote necessary changes to the fashion industry of the twenty-first century.
Fashion and costumes in the work of Italian filmmaker Robert Vignola in silent Hollywood
While the influence of dive fashion on the cross-class audience of Italian silent cinema has been established the relationship between fashion and silent Hollywood stresses the class-composition of the audience. The work of director Robert G. Vignola born in Italy but active in the United States clarifies the passage from a cinema addressed to the popular audience of the nickelodeon to the middle class and specifically women in the narrative and through stars within the suggestions of fashion. There is a general consensus about Italian American culture being an extension of Italianness. In the press Vignola was always identified as an Italian and his artistic sensibility was credited to his Italian origins at a time where Italian silent cinema was incredibly popular on American screens. From a transnational perspective the role of fashion in his work both within a historical perspective and in the theoretical debate on female silent film spectatorship also points to the underestimated relations between American media and Italian culture.
Feminist genealogies, archival constellations and women’s labour in fashion films: Anna Piaggi: una visionaria nella moda (2016) and Triangle (2014)
In this article I examine how Alina Marazzi and Costanza Quatriglio deal with the world of haute couture and off-the-rack fashion and with the turn to the archive in their documentaries. They construct feminist genealogies (between maternage and spectral sisterhood) in the fashion world and adopt different modalities of montage (between gleaning and détournement). In Anna Piaggi: una visionaria nella moda (‘Anna Piaggi: A fashion visionary’) (2016) Marazzi focuses on Anna Piaggi a renowned fashion editor for Vogue Italia. In contrast Costanza Quatriglio in Triangle (2014) centres her story on the 123 women textile workers victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York in 1911 in counterpoint to her interview with Mariella Fasanella the only survivor of a collapsed sweatshop in Barletta Italy in 2011. The two filmmakers produce a short circuit in fashion films among feminist genealogies archival constellations and women’s labour in the fashion industry activating a feminist and ethical stance.
Film, fashion, costume and Rome-based archives
This essay presents a mapping of archival sources public and private connected to the activities of the cine-theatrical tailors and costume designers in order to reconstruct a productive and cultural reality of absolute excellence that starting from the past century developed in Rome. The aim is to offer information in the context of personal archives consisting of documentary assets of various types ranging from collections of press clippings photographs notes working manuscripts and above all else collections of original sketches often accompanied by samples of fabrics produced by costume designers for the creation of cinematic televisual and theatrical costumes. The major film and theatre ateliers operating in Rome are listed and follow a focus on the archival funds of costume designers of the Chiarini Library of the Experimental Center for Cinematography Foundation. Designers include such names as Gino Carlo Sensani Piero Tosi Vera Marzot Adriana Berselli Marisa D’Andrea and Alberto Verso.
Africa’s Lost Classics: New Histories of African Cinema, Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy (eds) (2014)
Review of: Africa’s Lost Classics: New Histories of African Cinema Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy (eds) (2014)
Oxon and New York: Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 217 pp.
ISBN 978-1-90797-551-6 h/bk $48.95